Ancestry Trees–Merge option and other anomalies

The reason for my jubilation is that is the latest email from Ancestry they have announced that you can now merge two individuals on your Ancestry trees. There are many ways whereby you end up with two or more entries for one ancestors, a common one is when one parents dies between census and if you aren’t paying attention and just click away you can end up with the surviving parents having two families with children of the same name. If you have never done this then you will wonder what I am on about, but if you have you’ll know exactly how annoying it is!!

The email has the merge instruction under Top Tips and a link to the website. Clicking on the link takes you to the Ancestry Blog with an entry dated 7 December 2012 giving clear instruction on how to tidy up your tree using the new merge tool. On this page are several screen shots and the one that shows the drop down box of “More Options” has a list of options

Add a note

Create a military page

Find famous relatives

Save person to another tree

Merge with duplicate

Now when I clicked on the “More Options” tab on my Southwell tree I got a drop down box that just had

Add a note

Save person to another tree

Merge with duplicate

I suspected the difference was because I was logging into Ancestry.co.uk so I logged into Ancestry.com, open up my tree and yes, my theory was right the additional options were there. I have a Worldwide subs so I can log into .com, but I assume that if you just have a .uk subs you can’t. Wonder why the difference, if Ancestry read this and get back to me I’ll let you know why. In the meantime just enjoy merge all those ancestors who seem to have morphed into two people. Nothing like having a tidy family tree

About Me

History, particularly Family History is my passion. I have worked in libraries & archives, I teach family history, conduct workshops and give genealogy presentations. It seemed a shame to have all this knowledge & experience and not share it with others, so this website was born.